It’s almost time to start thinking about this year’s Worst Company In America tournament, which can mean only one thing — two-time reigning WCIA champ Electronic Arts is once again making a final push to be hated by its own customers. This time, the video game giant has been caught apparently trying to game the Google Play review and ratings system. [More]

When reigning two-time Worst Company In America champ Electronic Arts released the hugely anticipated SimCity game in April 2013, it unleashed a hornets’ nest of bad publicity by not only requiring that players be online in order to use the game but also grossly underestimating its ability to deal with all of those users trying to play the game at the same time. Many owners of the game were unable to play for weeks until EA resolved the issue, but the company stood by the ill-advised decision to require an Internet connection. Now, ten months and ten updates later, it’s finally relenting. [More]

2013 ends in a few hours, and in the year since we last popped champagne corks and pretended to know the words to “Auld Lang Syne,” we’ve posted more than 5,000 stories to Consumerist, covering everything from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to the drive-thru lane. Some of these posts attracted a few more readers than others. [More]

We haven’t even begun to ask for nominations from readers for the next Worst Company In America tournament, but some are already making the case for once again giving the Golden Poo trophy to reigning two-time WCIA winner Electronic Arts. [More]

Irritating your customers may be bad corporate practice, but it’s not illegal and won’t earn you anything worse than a golden poo or two. Irritating your stockholders, on the other hand, can indeed earn you a trip to court.

Not so long ago, if you bought a book with missing pages — or a DVD that skipped, or a CD or video game that wouldn’t play — you took it back to the store and got an exchange or a refund because obviously the manufacturer did not intend to provide you with an incomplete or broken product. The relatively new era of digital media delivery has improved upon this by allowing content providers to patch files and fix errors, but it’s also allowing companies to knowingly release inferior and/or broken products, often without giving the consumer any way to seek redress. [More]

For several years, reigning two-time Worst Company In America Electronic Arts has been fighting a lawsuit filed by former college athletes that accused the video game publisher, along with the NCAA and a third-party licensing firm, of illegally profiting off the likenesses of student-athletes. Now that it looks like the case could finally go to trial, EA has reached a settlement with the plaintiffs — and has ditched plans to put out a college football game in 2014. [More]

In the midst of a right to publicity lawsuit (which is part of a larger antitrust lawsuit) currently underway against video game publisher Electronic Arts, another athlete has lawyers filing a proposed class-action suit claiming that EA’s use of college athletes’ names and likenesses in its games is “blatant and unlawful.” [More]

Two of the most-reviled companies in America — cable colossus Comcast and gaming Goliath Electronic Arts — appear to be working together, presumably to figure out a way to nickel-and-dime customers and then provide them horrible customer service, via a new gaming system that serves up “console-quality” games through Comcast’s set-top boxes. [More]

Even though reigning, two-time Worst Company In America Electronic Arts is no longer in the video game business with the folks at the NCAA, the once-inseparable couple are both defendants in an antitrust lawsuit brought by former college athletes who allege that NCAA-branded games illegally made money from the players’ likenesses. Now EA is distancing itself even further from NCAA, claiming it was just doing what NCAA told it to do. [More]

The folks at Hasbro have never had a problem letting everything from towns to universities to movies to big-name commercial brands slap their names on licensed versions of Monopoly, but a new version of the classic board game is unabashedly all about learning the value of today’s biggest fast food, retail, tech, and entertainment companies — everything a growing child needs to get ahead! [More]

While we know in our heart that winning a second consecutive Worst Company In America title was the most heartbreaking moment for video game publisher Electronic Arts, this news has to come a pretty close second. The NCAA, which had an exclusive arrangement with EA to produce the wildly popular NCAA-branded college football game, has decided it won’t be signing a new contract with EA. However, it doesn’t look like it’s the end for EA’s association with college football. [More]

While SimCity got all of the publicity and helped publisher EA win a major award, it’s certainly not the only single-player game out there that requires you to be connected to the publisher’s server all the time. For example, there’s Darkspore, another EA/Maxis title released in 2011 that some gamers still enjoy. Sometimes. [More]